Divine intervention: Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet

Like Microsoft, Google shows its own partners how one builds a tablet.

Kindle, who? Fire, what?

Google has freely admitted that it's selling the Nexus 7 at cost, and is absorbing marketing costs (R&D may have been somewhat lower than usual due to the fact that the hardware was parboiled at Asus, but was probably still a nontrivial factor). But to say this tablet is a financial wash for Google would be naive. This is one of the richest companies in the world, and was built on primary offerings of free services to consumers. We're kind of surprised that Google didn't eat some of the cost of this kind of hardware sooner to put a stake in the tablet soil. Perhaps it was holding this play, its Annexation of Puerto Rico, to see how things developed without this level of intervention.

Two things are going to supplement Google's Nexus 7 foray: to a large extent, the data it will cull from usage to power its ever-growing ad network, and to a lesser extent, content. The Kindle Fire's monetary viability was built largely on the same blocks, though the emphasis was reversed. Google has already been monetizing with both tools through its Android phones for a few years (now 50 percent of all smartphones in the US, from which Google makes no money directly). A tablet for $199 with no contract strings attached could well reach a new and wide audience to power Google's algorithms.

Of course, there's another story here too: Google, perhaps like Microsoft, has likely become tired of seeing Android tablets of any size get released and flounder, and flounder, and flounder. Several publications have made the point by now that, with this move, Google is pricing every other tablet manufacturer out of house and home. It's true that no one else is going to be able to hit this price point. At least, not without Google's help (as Asus had in this iteration). But really, was there any other option? Apple has been unstoppable in this market segment, and Android hardware partners simply don't have the resources to keep pace. We wonder if Google would adopt this relationship with other manufacturers, effectively bringing the entire Android ecosystem in tablet form closer to Google's own vest. We wonder who will get dibs on the 10-inch model.

If you've made your peace with all that (or, in privacy terms, are comforted by the ability to hide some of yourself behind Chrome's Incognito browsing mode), the Nexus 7 is absolutely a worthy buy. We are as pleased with this experience as we were displeased at the execution on Amazon's 7-inch non-tablet (which, unbelievably, is still sitting staunchly at its own $199 price point). We expect a sale on the Kindle Fire any day now, and if rumors are to be believed, a Kindle Fire sequel is due out in the next few months.

The only straightforwardly, mystifyingly bad point on the Nexus 7 is the front-facing camera. Avid video-chatters (and self-portraitists) will want to tread warily here.

A smaller point of hesitation is the ecosystem: there's just not much devotion to the 7-inch form factor among Android developers thanks to its short but messy history. A really successful model may turn them around, but expectations for beautifully designed and scaled apps should probably stay low for now. It's an unfortunate thing to have to say, but the 7-inch tablet bed has already been partially made.

The Nexus 7 is going to become the go-to device for people who find the iPad too large, or find it too expensive. We're sure the latter exist, but after all this time the question remains: does the former? We find the 7-inch screen a downside in some respects, but many gadget companies have hoped against hope that this is really a form factor consumers want, apart from the iPad, if only they could nail the execution. Finally, we'll find out if they're right.

The Bad

Developers may ignore the 7-inch form factor, graphics-wise, for some time. Many apps may be a bit ugly

The Ugly

Ever wanted to be a watercolor? The Nexus 7's camera is here to fulfill all your romantically sketchy appearance needs. (Update: the camera without video chat is less bad, but still a 1.2MP camera, and all that implies.)

Promoted Comments

To be fair, the camera issue looks more like a compression problem than a bad camera. Perhaps the Skype app only uses a single core and thus has to scale the quality way down. To get a real sense of the camera, you need a real camera app or at least wait a few weeks for the video chat apps/Skype to be updated to work well with this setup. This is not to say that the camera is outstanding, but I can't believe it's actually really that bad (plus, a bad camera would look different).

How often do you really need that much space nowadays? I fell for that a couple years ago with my phone, so I have 32GB of storage. I parked 14GB or so of music on it back then, which just sits there, hardly used, because of things like Pandora and Google Music. For documents, I just grab things from Dropbox when they're needed. Apps take up less than a gigabyte, even back when I had 140 apps or so installed. Even as a pretty heavy user, for 99% of my uses I could get by with 8GB or less, so 16GB is plenty for me.

The lack of an SD card reader is a bit saddening though, as that would cheaply provide increased storage for those that would like it.

I have to agree with you there. I fretted about getting a Galaxy Nexus because it doesn't have a microSD slot. When I really thought about it, I realized my 16GB iPad is not exactly starving for storage space. You're correct - mobile data moving to the cloud makes storage expansion less of an issue for most customers. I still want expansion slots on principle, but it's no longer a critical feature.